IGM Candidate Profile: Yosef Abramowitz

Yosef I. Abramowitz- nicknamed Captain Sunshine- has announced his candidacy for the Green Party list after over 30 years of active environmental leadership experience. Aiming to make Israel carbon neutral, Yosef strongly advocates increasing the state’s reliance on renewable energy to 40 percent by the year 2020. Yosef believes that this will illustrate Israel’s willingness to not only be a responsible nation but also to be a “shining example of what can be accomplished by coordinated global action.”

In addition to leading the campaign to change and improve Israel’s laws, regulations, and general indifference toward solar power generation, Yosef is also active in promoting solar power development with Jordan and other countries in the region. “Israel must not only renounce nuclear power as an option,” Yosef believes, but also must “challenge others in the region to do the same.” Advancing regional solar energy solutions should be on the national security agenda, since he believes this will greatly assist making the Middle East a permanently nuclear-energy-free zone.

Yosef currently presides over the Arava Power Company, which recently announced a 500 megawatt pipeline for solar power on kibbutzim. He is a guest lecturer at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, and has been co-nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize for building the human rights movement in the Former Soviet Union. He blogs daily at Peoplehood.org